You're the mess I'd wear with pride
by punchfacechampion
Summary: An attempt to pen some of Mindy's feelings and insecurities from the latest episode. Spoilers for 2.12!


**2.12 SPOILERS!**

**I think from re watching this episode about a thousand times I'm just reading way too much into everything now. But hopefully this doesn't suck!**

**I wrote it listening to "Sway" by The Perishers on repeat; the lyrics fit season 2 Mindy and Danny so well, and even more so in this episode! It is maybe worth listening to if you have free time :)**

* * *

He wants to talk about it. He wants to give her notes.

Some jerk forgot to properly label the steam room, and now Danny knows about Mindy's swastika scar, and he's standing there trying to talk to her about it, and she wants to die.

He probably saw the birthmark on her left thigh, too.

He couldn't have missed that huge zit on her back, just under her shoulder-blade. The one that appeared out of nowhere this morning, and she tried Listerine and honey and ice but it's still there and she's starting to lose faith in Google.

He knows that she waxes. That she uses glittery lotion where no one will see it, because Oprah says she should do things just for her sometimes. He knows that the skin along the dip of her spine is a shade darker than the rest of her back.

But really, it's more than that. He knows so much more than that.

He knows what she looks like when she cries. When she _really _cries.

He knows that she lies about her age on Facebook and Tinder.

He knows that she crashed two of her ex's weddings.

He knows she doesn't get art.

He knows when she passes out in the lounge after a long delivery she leaves drool spots on the throw pillows, then flips them over to hide it.

He knows she's scared she'll never find love.

He knows she's selfish. She never tips. She can't cook.

He knows too much.

"I think you should quit," she says.

He wants to give her advice about her body. He wants to tell her what he hates about it, and about her, and she knew he would. They all do.

The difference is, he has actually seen her at her worst and, maybe more importantly, at her best. He saw her naked long before today.

He knows exactly who she is…and if she has to hear _him_ say that she's not enough? She's not thin enough? Not good enough?

That might break her.

He could break her.

She's close to putting her hands over her ears, five-year-old style, or locking herself in her office, or maybe using the seventeen sick days she has accrued by having a great immune system and taking three different kinds of multivitamins. But offense is the best defense.

She tells him all the things that are wrong with her before he can tell her.

"I _know_ that I could lose fifteen pounds. I know I don't have this perfect, skinny, hot body like all the girls that you date. I know that one of my boobs is crazily bigger than the other one — and don't _look_." She takes a breath. Her voice shakes when she keeps going. "I know that I have upper knee fat and I know that I have a scar on my back that looks like a swastika."

He tells her he didn't even notice.

"Maybe you could get cataract surgery, old man!" she says, and she wills him to take the bait the way he would have two years ago.

He doesn't. He won't let her hide under the sheets. "I get it. You're self-conscious. I understand. But you have no reason to be!"

The look on her face is as unconvinced as she is.

"All I was going to say is don't stuck in your stomach so much. It makes you… It makes you look nervous. And frankly a little constipated."

"_And_ get a boob job," she says, because it wasn't the swastika or the knee fat so it's obviously her rack. That's what he hates about her.

"_No_, that's not what I was going to say."

"_And_ get rid of the cellulite on your legs."

"No."

"_And_ have blue eyes."

"I don't want that."

He looks at her; he is looking at her. All of her. The good parts, the bad parts, and all he wants to change is how she sucks in her stomach?

She looks away because she has to. It's a lot. "Oh."

She pushes down the all the feelings threatening to squeeze her throat shut.

"You're a woman, and that's good. Look like a woman," he says.

_You're Mindy, and that's good. Be Mindy,_ is what she hears.

"Okay."

She doesn't know exactly what to say. She doesn't think she has ever really heard that before. There has always been _something_.  
She should go to church…she should cut her hair…she should like better music…she should drink kombucha and meditate…

Danny isn't saying 'I like you_, but…_'

That terrifies her. After all he's seen he should be running, she thinks. Why isn't he running?

When Cliff asks about her ankle she tells him she fell at the gym. It's not lying, it's omitting, and those are two very different things.

He raises his eyebrows but he doesn't question her.

It's Cliff she is intimate with later, when she is bravely fully naked, her casted leg resting awkwardly against the bed frame and the lights on above them.

It's Danny, and what he said, that she thinks about for hours after.


End file.
